Double Lives

“The Avengers” and “Headhunters.”

If you are a Marvel fan, then “The Avengers” will feel like Christmas. Thanks to the merry doings of the director, Joss Whedon, all your favorite characters are here, as shiny and as tempting as presents under the tree. You get Tony Stark, better known as Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.); Steve Rogers, or Captain America (Chris Evans); Natasha Romanoff, or Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson); Bruce Banner, or the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo); and Thor (Chris Hemsworth), whose real name is Thor. None of the weirdos from “X-Men” make the grade, nor do half-pints like Ghost Rider or the Silver Surfer, though I think that Whedon missed a trick: for old times’ sake, why not zip back to the first Marvel movie and wheel out Howard the Duck?

If you are not a Marvel fan, on the other hand, then watching “The Avengers” will feel like being mugged by a gang of rowdy sociopaths with high muscle tone. Absolutely no quarter is given to the ill-informed; the first scene is set in an undesignated patch of outer space, where some masked moaner yaks on in a rich and threatening baritone. I couldn’t understand a word until he asked, “The humans—what can they do but burn?” If he is referring to our cooking skills, this is grossly unfair, for we can also poach, broil, gently simmer, and steam en papillote. The speech, however, will make complete sense to those familiar with last year’s “Thor,” whose villain, Loki (Tom Hiddleston), is revived for the new film. Loki is a tall, well-spoken megalomaniac who bears a magic spear, although, for anyone who enjoyed Hiddleston’s spry and convincing turn in “Midnight in Paris,” the world would appear to be at the mercy of F. Scott Fitzgerald with a monkey wrench.

And it always is the world. One of the failings of Marvel—as of other franchises, like the “Superman” series—is the vulgarity that comes of thinking big. As a rule, be wary of any guy who dwells upon the fate of mankind, unless he can prove that he was born in Bethlehem. Superheroes who claim to be on the side of the entire planet are no more to be trusted than the baddies who seek to trash it, nor is the aesthetic timbre of the movies in which they both appear. I remember the joy of reading David Thomson’s entry on Howard Hawks, in “A Biographical Dictionary of Film”; the principle underlying Hawks’s work, Thomson argued, was that “Men are more expressive rolling a cigarette than saving the world,” and his adage rings true far beyond “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” or “The Big Sleep.” All movies thrive on the rustle of private detail—on pleasures and pains that last as long as a smoke—and there has been nothing more peculiar, in recent years, than watching one Marvel epic after the next, then sifting through the rubble of gigantism in search of dramatic life.

If it smolders in “The Avengers,” that is owing to Downey and Ruffalo, two A-grade actors who are damned if they are going to be smothered by a two-hundred-million-dollar B movie. Downey realized, in “Iron Man,” that spectacular pap could be made piquant only if the central icon was a jerk—a narcissist with a roaring cash flow, rescuing not Earth from destruction but, way more important, his own soul from fidgety ennui. Ruffalo, at the other extreme, is all diffidence and glancing timidity; as Banner, he seems embarrassed by the prospect of his own wrath, and there is a wonderful closeup of the sad, apologetic glow in his eyes as he turns green. Banner begins the film as a practicing doctor (not just any doctor but, in line with Marvel’s overreach, a doctor in an Indian slum), and ends as we might have guessed, slinging humongous metal lizards around the canyons of Manhattan.

The best way to treat “The Avengers” is as cinema’s answer to the supergroup. Stark and his buddies club together just as Bob Dylan, George Harrison, and the others did to form the Traveling Wilburys. Harrison wondered what it would be like to tour: “Would each person do a solo set and then do Wilburys at the end, or would we all go right on from beginning to end and make everything Wilburys?” Whedon leans toward the first option, and so, come the climax, they all do Wilburys: even as Thor tosses his mallet, Iron Man hurls energy pulses from his palms, while Captain America waves his slightly underwhelming shield, and, not to be left out, Black Widow repels invading aliens through the sheer force of her corsetry. This mania is what Marvel followers have hungered for, and it would be fruitless to deny their delight. As Loki says to a crowd of earthlings, “It is the unspoken truth of humanity that you crave subjugation.” We do, Master, we do.

The hero of “Headhunters” is named Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie), and his height is one metre sixty-eight—five feet six. He tells us so at the start of the film, and again at the end. What happens in between consists of his convoluted, bloodbathed attempt to stand tall. Given that his wife, Diana (Synnøve Macody Lund), whom he worships, towers over him, like a heron over a tit, you can vaguely understand his point of view.

Roger is, unlikely though it sounds, Norwegian. He works in Oslo, at a high-end recruitment agency—hence, if only in part, the movie’s title. He moonlights as an art thief, typically booking a client into a crucial interview and then, at the appointed hour, slipping into the guy’s empty house and relieving him of a picture. Roger is aided by a contact at a security firm, Ove (Eivind Sander), who disables the alarm and takes his cut. The sight of Ove—seedy, balding, and distractible, with a Russian playmate in tow—is an early hint that “Headhunters” may run less than sweetly. Indeed, once the story barrels forward you sense that the game plan of the director, Morten Tyldum, is not just to pick up speed or tickle our nerves but to rebuke and, where possible, deface the calm, smile-lacquered gloss of corporate life.

The stumble comes, as stumbles do, when a weak soul upgrades the reach of his ambition—specifically, when Roger, who is low on funds and needs a major heist, graduates from Munch prints to a Rubens oil painting. It is owned by Clas Greve (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), who seems custom-made for the role of Roger’s nemesis: a former special-forces operative, the head of a tech company that specializes in tracking devices, and a handsome brute to boot. Worst of all, he meets Diana, who works at an art gallery, and takes her to bed. From here, the plot is a plunge—over the edge of a cliff, out of a hospital window, into a pit of ordure, and so forth. At one point, a snarling dog is speared on the back of a tractor: imagine a Carl Hiaasen novel shipped over from Florida to Norway. Clearly, there are streaks of farce in all this, as well as serious cracks in logic, and those who like their black comedy done to a crisp will happily feast on what Tyldum dishes up. (The tale is based on a thriller by Jo Nesbø.) My own taste for nastiness has, I admit, grown less tolerant with time, and, by a dour coincidence, I saw “Headhunters” on the first day of the trial of Anders Behring Breivik, the fanatic who murdered seventy-seven people last year, first in Oslo and then on the island of Utøya. The recitation of those events, as heard by the court, has proved unrelievedly bleak. Should the thought of them disturb one’s enjoyment of “Headhunters,” or do outrageous fictions owe nothing to intolerable fact? Either way, Norwegians had no qualms; whatever their collective trauma, they flocked to the movie when it opened in Norway, a month after Breivik’s crime. “Headhunters,” a gleeful exercise in overkill, became the second-most-successful film of the year.

The American rights had been sold before filming began, so the remake should not be long in coming. The question is, who will play Roger? My advice to casting agents: start looking for a shorter, wider, younger, paler Christopher Walken, more freaked out than freaking, with pumpkin-colored locks. (Hair, and how you get rid of it, is a big deal in this movie.) Get Roger right, and the rest of the story will follow; pick the wrong man, and it will founder in a swamp of implausibility. Aksel Hennie’s Roger, certainly, will be hard to top. It seems ridiculous that we should warm to this super-creep, and yet, by the end, he has our sympathy. Something about him invites humiliation, and Tyldum does not hang back from piling on the shame; that is why Roger’s very doggedness commands respect. Watch him in Diana’s gallery, as he sees her flirt with Clas at an evening party—a pair of superior beings at play. The look in Roger’s eyes, wide but steady, is perfect in its mortification, and my immediate response was: what a superb Iago this actor would make—what pleasure he would take in his vengeful acts, and how irreparably he would be fouled up in the consequence. “Headhunters” is admirably swift in style, and dangerously silly in what it begs us to swallow, but at its heart is a consummate depiction of a permanent type—the proud and prickly male, thrown back on his desperate wits. Small may not be beautiful, but it lives. ♦